If we think of the community as needing one ops person and one research person, the marginal value in each area drops to zero once that role is filled.
Yes, but these effects only show up when the number of jobs is small. In particular: If there are already 99 ops people and we are looking at having 99 vs. 100 ops people, the marginal value isn’t going to drop to zero. Going from 99 to 100 ops people means that mission-critical ops tasks will be done slightly better, and that some non-critical tasks will get done that wouldn’t have otherwise. Going from 100 to 101 will have a similar effect.
In contrast, in the traditional comparative advantage setting, there remain gains-from-coordination/gains-from-trade even when the total pool of jobs/goods is quite large.
The fact that gains-from-coordination only show up in the small-N regime here, whereas they show up even in the large-N regime traditionally, seems like a crucial difference that makes it inappropriate to apply standard intuition about comparative advantage in the present setting.
If we want to analyze this more from first principles, we could pick one of the standard justifications for considering comparative advantage and I could try to show why it breaks down here. The one I’m most familiar with is the one by David Ricardo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Ricardo’s_example).
Yes, but these effects only show up when the number of jobs is small. In particular: If there are already 99 ops people and we are looking at having 99 vs. 100 ops people, the marginal value isn’t going to drop to zero. Going from 99 to 100 ops people means that mission-critical ops tasks will be done slightly better, and that some non-critical tasks will get done that wouldn’t have otherwise. Going from 100 to 101 will have a similar effect.
In contrast, in the traditional comparative advantage setting, there remain gains-from-coordination/gains-from-trade even when the total pool of jobs/goods is quite large.
The fact that gains-from-coordination only show up in the small-N regime here, whereas they show up even in the large-N regime traditionally, seems like a crucial difference that makes it inappropriate to apply standard intuition about comparative advantage in the present setting.
If we want to analyze this more from first principles, we could pick one of the standard justifications for considering comparative advantage and I could try to show why it breaks down here. The one I’m most familiar with is the one by David Ricardo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Ricardo’s_example).